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I haven't watched the Mandalorian yet. I'm a fan of Star Wars and I always check out what the fanfiction looks like for each new live-action piece of it, but like many others, I've been dealing with so many emotions from real life that I seem to have a limited amount of emotional bandwidth and attention with which to process new fictional stories that require emotional engagement and might have like... conflict... and suspense. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually.
In the meantime, I'm still aware of new developments through fandom osmosis on Tumblr (I don't bother avoiding spoilers for most things). So I was aware when Timothy Olyphant showed up with a fetching undercut and I know that ( spoilers for season 2 of The Mandalorian ) (No spoiler content below this paragraph in the post itself.)
So to reiterate, in summary: less than a minute of shared screentime?, two weeks ago; and already 69 fics in the ship on AO3. (Nice.) (None of them including 69ing.)
I poked through the headers a bit, as is my wont, and discovered:
I opened a couple to skim through the beginnings and ends (of the long ones) or the whole thing (of the short ones) in curiosity... and something jumped out at me after a while:
The lack of explicit sex.
I saw some fluff, some fade to black, and a bit of unexplicit sex was present in the stories with sort of partial fade-to-black or rather vague references, but when I finally found one (that still wasn't entirely explicit, actually), it jostled the elbow of my memories from TPM fandom, sort of.
Now, there isn't a TOTAL absence of explicit sex in this pairing; last night there were 100 works exactly on AO3 and 10 were rated E, for 10%. BUT when you apply many of my usual filters...
... you come up with three, one of which says in the headers that it's "my first smut".
Because the first thing I read in TPM was a kink novelette set in a bdsm club (when you're introduced to a fandom via multifannish recs lists it tends to be the iconic ones), it's possible that my memories are a little skewed, but the contrast seemed rather shocking. I mean...
... even apart from how much kink there was in TPM (which felt like about half of it at times but I'll guess was probably more like 5-10%?) wasn't explicit sex like... the default? At least a quarter or a third of it?
(Feel free to argue with my impressions, anybody else who used to hang out in the TPM-era slash archives.)
Anyway, though, it really did make me wonder about how much the fandom demographics have shifted, both overall on AO3, and possibly specifically in Star Wars as a result of Disney producing constant kids' animated content for it for ten years.
In the meantime, I'm still aware of new developments through fandom osmosis on Tumblr (I don't bother avoiding spoilers for most things). So I was aware when Timothy Olyphant showed up with a fetching undercut and I know that ( spoilers for season 2 of The Mandalorian ) (No spoiler content below this paragraph in the post itself.)
So to reiterate, in summary: less than a minute of shared screentime?, two weeks ago; and already 69 fics in the ship on AO3. (Nice.) (None of them including 69ing.)
I poked through the headers a bit, as is my wont, and discovered:
- a bunch of WIPs begun
- a bunch of short-to-medium-length essentially fluffy shippy first time stories
- more than one extremely long shippy fic that was already written before the episode/character introduction, lol
- of course several people had already managed to finish shippy first-time fics that were over 10k words: not a lot of them, but a few
I opened a couple to skim through the beginnings and ends (of the long ones) or the whole thing (of the short ones) in curiosity... and something jumped out at me after a while:
The lack of explicit sex.
I saw some fluff, some fade to black, and a bit of unexplicit sex was present in the stories with sort of partial fade-to-black or rather vague references, but when I finally found one (that still wasn't entirely explicit, actually), it jostled the elbow of my memories from TPM fandom, sort of.
Now, there isn't a TOTAL absence of explicit sex in this pairing; last night there were 100 works exactly on AO3 and 10 were rated E, for 10%. BUT when you apply many of my usual filters...
- only finished works (8)
- that were written after the episode aired and hence not in a canon-divergent au (4)
- excluding threesomes with Boba Fett (3)
... you come up with three, one of which says in the headers that it's "my first smut".
Because the first thing I read in TPM was a kink novelette set in a bdsm club (when you're introduced to a fandom via multifannish recs lists it tends to be the iconic ones), it's possible that my memories are a little skewed, but the contrast seemed rather shocking. I mean...
... even apart from how much kink there was in TPM (which felt like about half of it at times but I'll guess was probably more like 5-10%?) wasn't explicit sex like... the default? At least a quarter or a third of it?
(Feel free to argue with my impressions, anybody else who used to hang out in the TPM-era slash archives.)
Anyway, though, it really did make me wonder about how much the fandom demographics have shifted, both overall on AO3, and possibly specifically in Star Wars as a result of Disney producing constant kids' animated content for it for ten years.
